A Bride for Jackson Powers (Desire, 1273)

by Dixie Browning

  Which meant dealing with Nicky. Jeannie’s new husband recognized a good thing when it fell into his lap and wasn’t about to let his stepmother-in-law horn in on it.

  “How many cans of formula do we have left?” Jax asked briskly, as if knowing she could use a distraction.

  “We’re out. It’ll have to be the milk next time. It might give her diarrhea, which could be a problem unless we can locate a source of diapers.”

  Hetty welcomed the chance to take on someone else’s problems. Jax and Sunny weren’t family, only passing strangers, but anything was better than being all alone in the wilderness of an overcrowded, shutdown airport with roughly a zillion frustrated holiday travelers.

  You’d think she’d know more about airports, having been married to a pilot, but after years of selling hardware, Gus had barely gotten started on his crop-dusting career before he’d been killed.

  “Want to go check out the weather report again?” Jax asked. He had the most remarkable eyes. Hetty couldn’t decide whether they were charcoal-gray or navy-blue. Mostly he kept his feelings hidden, but she’d caught glimpses of humor and concern. Once or twice she’d seen something that looked almost like admiration.

  Which had to be wishful thinking on her part.

  “Can we afford to leave our space unguarded?” Miracle of miracles, no one had tried to push past their fragile barrier. Jax had moved a sign advertising a Bermuda Cruise so that it hid the area where they’d slept.

  “There’s a lot of coughing and sneezing going on. I don’t mind taking my chances, but I hate to expose Sunny any more than I have to.”

  It was decided that they would take turns scouting out food and information, and baby-sitting. He said, “I’ll make a run and see if I can round up some diapers and baby food.”

  “I think I saw a drugstore down that way about half a mile,” Hetty offered.

  There had to be something in an airport this size. It was almost a small city in itself. “I’ll give it a shot,” he said as he eased past the wheelchair.

  She smiled, and without realizing it, Jax smiled back and went on smiling for the next few minutes until he caught himself at it.

  He wasn’t a smiler. It wasn’t his nature. Something—either the ice storm or the woman—was royally screwing him up.

  The day passed in slow motion, as if the hands of all the clocks had gone on strike. From sheer boredom, they lapsed into a desultory conversation. It started when Hetty caught him looking at her hands. She had polished her nails for the first time in years, but no amount of polish could disguise years of housework, minus all but the most basic appliances.

  “I told you I’d been married. I don’t wear my wedding ring because it makes my fingers break out,” she confided diffidently.

  “You’re divorced?” He knew several divorced women who had shifted their rings to the other hand. It was a personal choice, he supposed.

  “My husband died.”

  “Oh. Sorry.” He told her his secretary was allergic to anything that contained fragrance, but not to metal.

  “My mother-in-law was allergic to animals. She used to live on a farm, too.”

  Jax murmured a polite response, and Hetty went on to describe the house and the barn that had been turned into a hangar, where Gus had kept his green-and-yellow Cessna.

  She told him about the potholders her mother-in-law had made. “She must have crocheted five hundred of the things before her last stroke. She couldn’t get out of bed, but she had the use of her hands right up until the last few months. I think it helped, having something to do.”

  “Your husband was a pilot?”

  “A crop duster. That is, he was a helicopter pilot during the Vietnam War. For a while he didn’t want to fly at all, but then this plane went up for sale and he got interested again, and one thing led to another.”

  Jax studied her for a long moment, making her aware all over again of how awful she must look. Something, probably the dry air, was making her hair frizz up all over her head. Not even the best haircut could change that, although even Jeannie, who’d barely been speaking to her by then, had agreed the cut was an improvement.

  “A ’Nam vet, hmm? He must’ve been a few years older than you.”

  “Age is irrelevant. Gus was the dearest man in the world. I’ve never known him to raise his voice, much less his hand, to anyone, no matter what the provocation.”

  Gradually Jax drew forth her story. He wasn’t a trial lawyer, but he did know how to elicit information. He also knew how to read between the lines. Either she was a damned good liar or he was going to have to realign his thinking when it came to women. Hetty Reynolds didn’t fit any recognizable pattern.

  Under the circumstances he couldn’t very well walk off and leave her to fend for herself, but he hoped to hell the weather broke before he got in any deeper.

  Three

  Stress. His doctor had told him four years ago, when he’d gone in for his last annual physical, that stress was a silent killer. Since then Jax had concentrated on relaxing whenever he could find time. It worked pretty well as long as nothing happened to blow his orderly routine, which could accommodate any number of international maritime disputes, ship disasters, oil spills and the like.

  It was what happened outside his professional life that tended to screw up the works. A couple of impulsive acts and his whole life had suddenly lost steerage. Impulse one had been buying an old relic of a schooner last fall. For nearly a century the Lizzie-Linda had worked the waterways from Maryland to North Carolina, first as an oyster boat, then as a freighter. There wasn’t a lick of paint left on her anywhere. Five inches of her eight-inch log bottom were rotten, yet something about her graceful lines and proud bearing had struck an unsuspected lode of romanticism buried deep inside him. For the cost of hauling and back storage he’d bought her and eventually found a place where he could keep her. Since then he’d spent most of his spare time and a considerable portion of his funds trying to patch her up.

  Impulse two had been Carolyn. About eighteen months ago he’d spent a week on the West Coast combining business with pleasure.

  Enter Sunny. She of the soggy bottom, the toothless grins and those big, navy-blue eyes that had drilled straight through his defenses the first time he’d seen her.

  Talk about your impulses!

  As if that weren’t enough, he had to hook up with a woman who didn’t fit into any of his neat pigeonholes. A woman with eyes the color of rainwater and a body like a walking wet dream. A woman who spoke softly and sang husky, off-key lullabies to a stranger’s crying baby.

  A woman who curled up on a hard floor and trustingly thrust her backside into his groin.

  Jax swore silently, pried open the tin of aspirin, chased a couple with a shot from the water fountain and chewed on another antacid tablet. He was no health nut, but all the same, he hoped nobody in this mob was carrying any exotic, multiresistant bugs. With all the coughing and sneezing going on all around them, Sunny could easily catch something.

  “Any news?” Tucking the blanket around the sleeping baby, he watched Hetty slip back through the narrow opening. Her skirt snagged on the Bermuda Cruise sign, pulling taut against her neat little behind for a moment. He tried unsuccessfully not to notice.

  Stress. It made a man do crazy things, all right. Even scarier, it made him think crazy thoughts.

  “I stopped to watch a weather update on TV. You wouldn’t believe what’s going on,” she said breathlessly. “Tornadoes in Tennessee and Arkansas, floods in the northwest and an avalanche somewhere in France. I heard some people a few gates down talking about the apocalypse. One woman kept insisting it was a natural cycle and that contrary to popular belief we’re simply entering another glacial age.”

  “In that case, I guess we might as well settle down for the next few millennia.”

  She nodded with mock gravity. “In other words, this is going to be another tomb, like the pyramids or one of those ancient garbage dumps archeolo
gists are always discovering, full of pots and old bones and arrowheads. Is that what you’re saying?”

  “I think they’re called kitchen middens.”

  “Not this one. All the food stands have closed. They’re saying nobody showed up for work today and, anyway, they can’t get fresh supplies in.”

  “Hardly surprising.” Jax was distracted by the way her hair slid across her cheeks as she settled beside him. He was no expert, but the color, as near as he could place it, was somewhere between heart cedar and red oak. More red than brown, with golden glints.

  She sighed, loosened the light blanket Jax had just tucked tightly around Sunny’s feet and said, “What do you suppose an archeologist would think if a thousand years from now he came across all this?” She waved her hands expressively. “All of us here and our luggage, all tangled up with rusted airplanes and whatever’s left of the buildings?”

  “That some of us probably starved to death and others succumbed because they didn’t know how to dress for the weather,” Jax said dryly. “Here, put this on.” He handed her his jacket.

  “Are you sure?”

  She reminded him of a gray-eyed doe, which made about as much sense as anything else that had trudged through his mind lately. “Yeah, I’m fine. Warm-natured. You’re starting to shiver.”

  “It feels like there’s a draft, but it might be because I’m cold-natured.”

  “Right. That explains why you’re dressed in summer clothes in the middle of an ice storm.”

  “I told you, I was supposed to go to Florida. I’d have looked silly boarding a cruise liner in my winter coat and woolies.”

  He let it pass. Under the circumstances it was a wonder they weren’t at each other’s throats. People tended to take out their frustrations on those closest, bickering for no good reason at all. He’d seen a fist fight break out a few hours ago over a week-old Wall Street Journal.

  “The muscles at the back of my neck keep tightening up. Do you suppose it’s from sleeping on the floor?” she asked.

  “Relax. Flex your shoulders. Better still, turn around.”

  She turned, and he cupped his hands over the delicate bones of her shoulders and began to work his fingers against the tense muscles. She groaned. “Ahh, that feels wonderful,” she murmured. “It hurts, but in a nice way.”

  His thumbs moved up under her hair. Her skin was soft and cool, her hair warm and silky. He had a sudden urge to place his mouth where his fingers were, and it scared him so much he dropped his hands, brushed them together and said briskly, “There, that ought to do it.”

  She sighed and slumped back against the wall. Jax sighed, too. He wasn’t given to sighing. If he’d brought along his laptop he could’ve made some headway on the Arzan case, but he’d figured on a turnaround trip.

  No more touching, he decided. Rationality was one of the first casualties in extraordinary circumstances. He’d read about a couple of strangers who’d been stuck in an elevator together for five hours. The guy had subsequently proposed, the woman accepted and the marriage had lasted all of three weeks.

  For the next few hours Jax made a deliberate effort to avoid touching her. It only made things worse. Naturally his brain stayed focused on what it was he wasn’t supposed to do.

  She had to be as aware of the growing tension as he was. The more they avoided even the slightest accidental touch, the more some mysterious magnetic force attracted his hand to her shoulder, her hand to his arm. Both pairs of eyes to both pairs of lips.

  Dammit, they were strangers, Jax reminded himself. Ships that pass in the endless foggy, sleety, ice-bound night.

  With no breakfast, lunch or dinner to divide the time into measurable segments, they took brief naps, then woke to go check and see if anything had changed.

  Nothing had. Gates were unmanned. Information stations were swamped. The official line was that weather improvements were expected momentarily. A warm front was moving up from the Gulf. Announcements would be made.

  Sunny was handling things remarkably well, Hetty thought, for a teething baby with a diaper rash who stayed wet and hungry most of the time. She was learning to sit up. Robert, her stepgrandson, had sat alone at five months, but Hetty tactfully refrained from crowing. Sunny was heavier. Heavier babies had more to support.

  Besides, she had a feeling Sunny had spent far more time in her carrier than Robert ever had.

  For long stretches of time they remained silent. Oddly enough, it was a comfortable silence, yet awareness of each other was never far from the surface.

  Jax wondered how long she’d been widowed and if she’d taken a lover yet. He wondered what her husband had been like and how good their marriage had been. There’d been a considerable age difference, if the guy was a ’Nam vet.

  Hetty wondered about Sunny’s mother, and what had happened between the two of them. She wondered about the other women in his life. Surely there must be someone. Jax wasn’t the kind of man not to be romantically involved. He practically radiated sex appeal.

  Only not with her. Not intentionally, at least. Not that she expected him to make a pass, because even with her new clothes and her new hairstyle, she was still plain old Hetty Reynolds.

  Bored, restless, frustrated and physically uncomfortable, they lapsed into small talk to pass the time. It wasn’t something Jax excelled in, but it beat dwelling on all the work piling up on his desk. Not that he was obsessed by his profession, but when a man contracted to do something, he was obligated to follow through. It was a creed he’d learned early and had done his best ever since to live up to.

  Hetty sighed and shifted her position. “This floor’s not getting any softer.” Beyond the glaring lights outside, the sky was dark.

  It was as close as she’d come to a complaint. Jax wished he had a cushion to offer her, but his coat was covering Sunny now that her blankets had to double as diapers. He could offer his lap, but under the circumstances, that probably wouldn’t be smart.

  “So, d’you want to talk politics?” he asked after another long stretch of silence. “How about religion? Favorite foods? Nah, scratch that.” He dug out his roll of antacid tablets, offered her one and when she declined, absently popped one in his mouth to offset the effect of aspirin on his stomach lining.

  “Your head still hurts, doesn’t it?”

  He nodded, then wished he hadn’t. “Not bad. Probably low barometric pressure.”

  “Or noise. Or lack of a decent meal. Or all this awful uncertainty. I hate uncertainty, don’t you?”

  “Nothing’s ever certain.” He shrugged, then confessed. “Yeah, I do. Too much, I guess. I’ve always been subject to rules. Boarding school, marine corps, law school.” He wasn’t into confidences, but hell…ships that pass in the night, and all that.

  “I guess rules are sort of like a tight girdle. While it might be miserable, at least it smooths out the bulges and you know you’re not jiggling.”

  He lifted both eyebrows, his gaze moving slowly down her wand-slender form. “You’re kidding.”

  “Not me—I mean, I don’t wear a girdle—oh, mercy, I don’t believe I said that. Honestly, I’m not in the habit of discussing my underwear with strange men.”

  “I’m not all that strange,” he said with a crooked grin.

  “No, you’re not,” she said earnestly. “Jax, I really don’t know how to thank you for—well, for taking me under your wing. I might’ve mentioned before that I’m not really a very experienced traveler. I’d probably have panicked.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. I suspect Hetty Reynolds is a lot stronger than she pretends.” He studied her intently for a moment before his gaze softened, straying to her mouth to linger there before returning to her eyes again. Her lips, naked and vulnerable, trembled once, then firmed, and he thought, yeah, you’re a lot stronger than you look, lady.

  He couldn’t help but wonder what had made her that way.

  The food machines were still empty. No surprise. The concessions were still closed in
all the terminals, also no great surprise. Sunny drank the last of the whole milk diluted with bottled water and chewed frantically on her teething ring, then fussed herself to sleep while Hetty crooned a husky, off-key lullaby about looking glasses and mockingbirds.

  And because her voice affected him in a totally inappropriate way, Jax took a jog on the moving sidewalk. To loosen up his muscles, he’d explained, telling her he’d be back in twenty minutes.

  He returned in thirty-five with a half-melted candy bar. He’d paid a kid twenty bucks for the thing, then felt guilty for depriving a growing boy of sustenance.

  Sunny was sleeping soundly, undisturbed by the constant din all around them. “Here, I got lucky,” he said, tossing the candy bar to Hetty.

  “Oh, wonderful!” And then she lifted stricken eyes to his. “But what about you? I’ll break it in half—wait a minute, maybe I can cut it with—” She rummaged in her big, lumpy shoulder bag.

  “I already ate mine. Sorry. I didn’t think you’d mind.”

  There’d been only one. He was so hungry his belly was knotted around his backbone, yet he took great satisfaction in being able to provide for his unexpected family. He’d found a new source of bottled water, also at a price, and stocked up. Two liters. That should last for the duration. Something had to break loose pretty soon.

  “Oh, mmm, this is scrumptious!”

  Jax tucked his coat around Sunny’s feet. They had two thin flannel blankets left to use as diapers. Hetty had tried washing them, but with no soap and no place to dry them, it wasn’t a very satisfactory arrangement. Things had to start moving pretty soon. He’d never heard of a delay this long.

  Now and then someone would approach the impromptu barrier he’d erected and linger, as if sizing up his chance of claiming a few feet of the space they’d commandeered, then shrug and move on. Jax slid down beside her. Feeling protective, he sat closer than absolutely necessary. Funny the way a minor disaster could turn a civilized maritime lawyer into a caveman. If anyone actually tried to horn in, what would he do? Use his briefcase as a club? Resort to fists?